Jay Harvey Upstage

 "Howdy!" is the one-word greeting Branford Marsalis offered to the large crowd gathered to hear his quartet Friday night at the Payne & Mencias Palladium. He may have dropped the salute as something implicitly Hoosier, but it would be hard to interpret it as looking down his nose at us. Neither effusive nor tight-lipped in his commentary, the veteran saxophonist showed the friendly demeanor that has always contrasted with the lecturing stance of trumpeter Wynton, the other household name among the distinguished New Orleans musical family.  He led one long set at  the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts jazz series, fronting a long- Branford Marsalis Quartet: By the third number, the jackets were off. intact group including Joey Calderazzo, piano; Eric Revis, bass, and Justin Faulkner, drums. Early in the performance came two catchy originals by Calderazzo, "Conversation Among the Ruins" and "The Mighty Sword." In between there was a zesty...

We are trained to believe in individual moral responsibility, but it's not making excuses to insist on the larger picture of understanding its limits. How are some of us more stamped than others by inescapable influences that rob us of agency? "Machinal" suggests strongly that for women, particularly a century ago, freedom of action is shaped conclusively by social limits affecting love, work, and family connections. The 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell is worth the expressionist revival that Southbank Theatre Company gives it through next Sunday at Shelton Auditorium. The theatrical style, conscientiously shepherded here under Marcia Eppich-Harris' direction, means that the feeling of events, especially protagonist-centered, is as important as the facts involved. There's no separation between what happens to the main character and how she processes her experience, symbolized and dream-linked as it is. Narrative orderliness is immaterial in this sort of storytelling...

Angela Brown, soprano from Indianapolis On the cultural high ground, no one minds departure from the formulas of presentation, at least when  there's something fresh about it. For symphony orchestras, the time-worn layout, in order, runs: overture, concerto, intermission, symphony. Some of that is intact this weekend as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's Classical Series resumes at Hilbert Circle Theatre. The orchestra's first of two full-length concerts had an overture by a mainstream composer to start with and a symphony by a master to conclude.  To help support the overall feeling of novelty, the overture was the largely unfamiliar one to Weber's opera "Euryanthe," a poster child of good composition let down by a poor libretto. The symphony was the easy-to-overlook No. 8 in F major by Beethoven, a work memorably characterized by Schumann as "a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants" (the seventh and ninth symphonies).  The real novelty ...

Barthold Kuijken, conductor and traverso soloist   If there is plenty of evidence that progress in the musical flowering called the High Baroque can be justly considered "Towards Telemann," as   Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra' s concert Sunday was titled, a host of influences he absorbed must have been responsible. That was explored fruitfully in the program put together and led by its artistic director, Barthold Kuijken, at the University of Indianapolis.  Georg Philipp Telemann's breadth of musical creation was fed by his receptivity to French, Italian, and German styles, types of patronage, and modes of expression. His appeal to his contemporaries and shortly after his time (1681-1767) was straightforward and broadly based, thanks to a succession of courtly appointments that made him more widely known than his contemporary, J.S. Bach. And the theater bug bit him as well. His work as an impresario and composer of opera helped, giving him a reputation for facil...

Marc-Andre Hamelin doesn't impose his personality on a variety of music so as to build a cult following. This is unlike old Hollywood stars, who molded each role onto their public personalities and built their careers on offering the best new version of their marketed presentation, like John Wayne or Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn.  But a personality need not be irrelevant or a distraction if the effort to probe deeply into a composer is sustained: the composer is revealed along with the individuality of the performer, and Hamelin does that to the level of wizardry. Thus a Debussy prelude as an encore has a veiled charm that the pianist seemed to view from the inside out, as though inhabiting the colorations and the linked, unsquare phrasing characteristic of the French composer. The demand to hear more, enthusiastically generated by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with whom he came to Carmel Saturday night, shed that kind of light. Marc-Andre Hamelin played Mozart with ins...

One of many good things said to come in threes (so far) is the collaboration between the Indianapolis Symphony   Orchestra and Indianapolis Ballet. The fairy-tale formula of the threefold charm fits perfectly with the current production of "The Sleeping Beauty." The Petipa-Tchaikovsky masterpiece tops all stage and screen versions of Charles Perrault's beloved fairy tale. In the first of three performancees Friday night in Clowes Hall, the guiding force was the company's interim director, Michael Vernon, succeeding the inspired founding director Victoria Lyras, who retired late last year. The production looked splendid, sets and costumes alike, especially in the first scene, The Christening, in which the traditional rite for infants at society's highest level is at the peak of splendor. Yoshiko Kamikusa danced the Rose Adagio on opening night. But of course, an error of royal etiquette, the seneschal Catalabutte's failure to invite the wicked fairy Carabosse,...